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War of the Rebellion: Serial 025 Page 0390 WEST TENN. AND NORTHERN MISS. Chapter XXIX.

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LA GRANGE, TENN., December 6, 1862.

Captain T. H. HARRIS, Assistant Adjutant-General:

It is reported the guerrillas will attack our pickets at Davis' Mill to-night. I have sent all my cavalry. Can you not send me a company? I have over a million and a half of ammunition which is exposed, besides quantities of stores.

A. S. NORTON,

Colonel, Commanding.

GENERAL ORDERS,

HEADQUARTERS RIGHT WING,

Numbers 2.

College Hill, Miss., December 6, 1862.

I. The indiscriminate and extensive plundering by our men calls for a summary and speedy change. Our mission is to maintain, not to violate, all laws, human and divine. Plundering is hurtful to our cause and to the honorable tone which characterizes the army of a great nation.

The Government of the United States undertakes to pay, clothe, and feed her troops well, and is prepared to do it. The officers and soldiers have no right to look to any other quarter for compensation and subsistence. By existing orders the quartermasters and commissaries of brigades may take corn-fodder and any species of forage, and cattle, hogs, sheep, meal, or any species of subsistence stores, which property they account for to the Government (in the same manner as if purchased, leaving to the proper authorities of our Government) to pay for the same or not according to the loyalty of the owner. Fire-wood can be taken by the troops from the standing or fallen timber, or even rails, when such timber is not to be had; but the taking of chickens, turkeys, pigs, or anything by soldiers is as much pillage and stealing as though committed in our own country, as these articles in fact belong to the Government of the United States, whose agents are present prepared to take them and issue to the troops as apart of their regular rations.

II. Each brigadier will hold each colonel or commander of a regiment responsible that when any of his men leave their ranks and pillage not only shall the stolen articles be turned into the brigade quartermasters or commissary, but that the soldiers be punished by fine or otherwise by sentence of a field officer.

III. Each brigadier may detail an officer and a sufficient number of men to forage, who will collect cattle, hogs, sheep, or any kind of subsistence, and also forage, which shall in all instances be receipted for by the proper accounting officer and issued to troops as part of their regular supplies.

IV. On a march soldiers must never leave their ranks without the order of their brigadier. If found out of their ranks, unless in the ambulances by order of the surgeon, the colonel will see that they are tried by a field officer as stragglers or pillager.

V. The firing of a gun is a false alarm, and will be punished as such, and if any man is a mile from his camp, unless sent for water or other duty, by the Articles of War he must be very severely punished. Patrols sent out may fire on such men, as they are as much enemies of their country as secesh.

VI. Colonels of regiments will cause the Articles of war to be read to their men now, and repeat it every ninth, and impress on them that they are employed to do the work of their Government and not their own will, and that we are in a hostile country where large armies,